He will be told [...] what it is to know and what to be ignorant; what ought to be the end of study; what valor, temperance, and justice are; the difference between ambition and avarice, servitude and submission, license and liberty; by what token a man may know true and solid contentment; how far death, pain, and shame are to be feared, "How to avoid and how to endure each strain;" what springs move us, and the reason for so many different impulses in us. For, I think, the first lessons with which one should saturate his understanding ought to be those which regulate his habits and his common sense; that will teach him to know himself and how both to die well and to live well.
Among the liberal arts let us begin with that which makes us free. They all serve in some measure to the formation of our life and to the use made of life, as all other things in some sort do; but let us make choice of that which directly and professedly serves to that end.
From Michel de Montaigne's'Of the Education of Children'

Character or Plot?

Most writers who appear on a platform, giving a reading or a talk, will come across the naïve question: What comes first for you, character or plot?
The question is unsophisticated, because in reality it is not possible to separate the two. Character is plot.

Character, in any sense in which we can get it, is action, and action is plot. Henry James.

I have written about this question before in various posts (use the search tool at the top of the page to find them).

But I thought the story of how George Eliot came across and developed the story of Adam Bede, might be instructive.

The story was suggested by an event in the life of Eliot’s aunt, Mrs Evans, a Methodist preacher. Mrs Evens had spent a night in prison with a convicted child-murderer, a mere girl. Evans had sought to make the girl recognize her guilt, and had then accompanied her to the hangman.

George Lewes, with whom Eliot lived in an open-marriage, suggested that the night in prison would make a good scene in a novel – and Adam Bede was conceived with that scene as its centerpiece.

Eliot created a seducer – obviously necessary to the plot – who was a young officer, heir to the local squire. But as well as her seducer, the girl, Hetty, is blessed with a true lover of her own class; Adam Bede.

George Lewes suggested that the novel should end with Adam’s marriage to the woman preacher, and that there should be a clash of some kind between Adam Bede and the young officer.

Leslie Stephen tells how, while she was listening to Wilhelm Tell at the Munich opera, George Eliot was inspired to make the two rivals fight.

The aunt’s story is softened considerably, in that Hetty is not guilty of murder, but only of temporary desertion of her baby. And neither is Hetty hanged, but instead transported to Botany Bay.

I find it both amusing and instructive to have the ability to follow the mind of a great novelist and to glimpse how different people and influences impinge on the development of her story.

What an interesting post! I’ve often been asked that type of question – I really like the conciseness of your response, “Character is plot.”

In my first published novel all the characters were completely fictional, but many of the settings are based on real places, so I was intrigued to read that Eliot used her own visit to a prison as a scene in Adam Bede. I’ve got a scene in a police cell and interview room in my novel, based on notes I took after accompanying a woman who came to literacy classes at an adult education centre where I worked.

I’ll be putting a post on my site soon, quoting from a real-life collection of love-letters from the 1920s in China, which I’ve adapted for one of the story threads in my new novel. I found the process of plundering someone else’s life rather weird. (I’ve changed names dates and venues, so they would be unrecognisable to anyone)